Introduction, "Hypocritical Readers: Baudelaire, Flaubert and the
Censors"
Chapter One, "The Waltz of Censorship"
Chapter Two, "Flaubert's Foresight"
Chapter Three, "Baudelaire's Precautions"
Chapter Four, "Pornograms"
Chapter Five, "Second Thoughts"
Conclusion
Notes
Index
William Olmsted is Senior Research Professor of Humanities at Valparaiso University.
"William Olmsted's study is an engaging, important and insightful
contribution to scholarship on the 1857 obscenity trials connected
to the publication of two landmarks of French literary modernism,
Les Fleurs du Mal and Madame Bovary... It is that strong approach
to integrating what are sometimes unnecessarily separate domains of
literary studies that is one of Olmsted's chief contributions to
the ongoing study of the moment of origin of French
literary modernism." --Joseph Acquisto, H-
"A savvy interpretation of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal, The
Censorship Effect brings to light new insights on both authors'
self-censorship in relation to prosecutors' literal readings.
Learned and engaging, William Olmsted enriches our reading
experience of works which have become deceptively familiar."
--Edward K. Kaplan, author of Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The
Esthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious in "The Parisian
Prowler"
"In 1857 occurred the trials for obscenity of both Flaubert's
Madame Bovary and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. The same
prosecutor, Ernest Pinard, 'the great simplifier,' ran both trials.
Hence William Olmsted's brilliant comparative study of how each
author censored himself before and after his trial. Olmsted's
naming of the 'pornogram,' i.e. a single then-unacceptable word, is
both enlightening and delightful, and his new view of
Flaubert's
famous 'free indirect discourse' should change literary criticism
for ever." --Annabel Patterson, author of The International
Novel
"Accessibly written and honestly argued, The Censorship Effect
shows how censorship operates subtly at the level of creation as
well as overtly at the level of reception; how some of the great
literary devices, and even our modern 'liberated' ways of reading,
have their origins in earlier writers' negotiation of a prevailing
mentality of censorship. Olmsted suggests not only that creativity
is never free of the censorship effect, but that a literalism
in interpretation, ostensibly in the name of anti-censorship,
precisely misses the point, even or especially in its effrontery."
--Jonathan Dollimore, author of Sex, Literature and Censorship
"A persuasive, highly readable, exploration of the ways in which
censorship shaped modernism, both by restricting what writers felt
they could say and by unwittingly inspiring forms of evasion.
Through his perceptive readings of Baudelaire and Flaubert, Olmsted
wittily demonstrates how writers, and in their wake, readers, lay
bare the unspeakable while seeming to cover it up." --Rosemary
Lloyd, author of Baudelaire's World
"Rather than starting with the cliché standoff between
freedom-loving author and repressive censor, Olmsted looks at the
fascinating story of how Flaubert and Baudelaire anticipated and
worked with censorship. Through meticulously researched
demonstrations, he shows how Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du mal
were shaped by their authors' 'waltzes' with the censor."
--Elisabeth Ladenson, author of Dirt for Art's Sake: Books on Trial
from Madam
BovaryI to Lolita
"Recommended."--Choice
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